A Question of Quotes

The project A Question of Style is led at The Open University by Francesca Benatti and David King. Funded by a Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Field Development Grant, the project aims to assess the assumption that early nineteenth-century periodicals succeeded in creating, through a “transauthorial discourse”, a unified corporate voice that hid individual authors behind an impersonal public text . The project focuses on the Edinburgh Review during the period 1814-1820 and employs methods from periodical studies, book history, computational linguistics and computational stylistics.

In a recent post, David King reflects upon the important issue of how to encode quotations in Edinburgh Review articles.

Quoted text is important to our analysis. When identifying authorial style in our corpus, we need to be able to distinguish between the writing of the reviewer and the reviewed. Hence, we need to exclude quoted text from our analysis easily and systematically. Our corpus is marked-up in TEI: Text Encoding Initiative XML. Using XML…